Leaked memos reveal ‘confusing’ ID card plans

By Rosa Prince, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:14am GMT 28/01/2008

The future of the Government’s identity card scheme is in confusion as it emerged that plans for a national fingerprint database may be quietly dropped.

MAY be is not good enough, and an NIR without fingerprints is still a pernicious and evil thing, of a kind that the Soviets would have wet their pants over…if they had the power to conceive of such a system.

At the same time, it appears that ministers are considering introducing a compulsory ID scheme by stealth, with plans that would require young people to obtain a card before being granted a driving licence.

We have said many times before, a driving license is a document certificate that proves you are competent to drive at a certain level, certain classes of vehicle. It should be used for nothing other than that, and what this immoral degenerate government is doing is a classic example of feature creep. Driving licenses are about road safety and nothing more.

The proposals were disclosed in two leaked Home Office documents and expose the lack of agreement within the Government over the extent to which ministers should continue with the commitment to ID cards.

A confidential document produced by the Home Office Identity and Passport Service and revealed in The Observer said: “We should test for each group we enrol whether the cost of fingerprints is justified by the use to which they will be put.”

First of all, these are the documents that we know about; heaven knows what else they have been discussing in secret. And of course they are doing it all in secrete because they instinctively know that what they are doing is evil and immoral. If any of this were of benefit to the public it would be done in public.

Secondly, the cost of fingerprinting is irrelevant, and once they go into any database, the use to which they will be put will always lead to a secondary use. Secondary use is one of the major, and most significant complaints about the NIR and ID cards, and not surprisingly, it is missed by the venal monsters who are in charge of cooking the witches pot of this scheme.

Asking people for their fingerprints so they can get a driving license is absurd; having someone’s fingerprints will not increase their skill as a driver, and it will not prevent accidents. None of these ‘security’ measures reduce crime. This is now a well established fact.

If you want to reduce traffic accidents, you make it easier to get driving licenses. Remove the barriers to people taking lessons and getting a license. There will be more skilled drivers on the road, less unlicensed drivers and a safer road system. But of course, ministers don’t care about road safety, they are desirous only of control over the individual at the minute by minute level, and they are, by their own language, looking for any way to get everyone on the database.

I 100% guarantee you that other, yet to be disclosed, leaked, secret documents state the following:

“…it is not imperative that we take fingerprints now; if we hold off on that part of the scheme, we still get a complete database and we can them include universal fingerprinting when that technology has improved. The increase in efficacy of fingerprinting technology in the future will help us make the case for it, and of course, everyone will already be conditioned to being on the NIR”.

You see?

A separate memo obtained by The People appears to contradict Gordon Brown’s insistence that ID cards will remain voluntary for everyone but foreigners living in the UK.

Headed “Options Analysis”, it says: “Various forms of coercion, such as designation of the application process for identity documents issued by UK ministers (eg passports) are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way.

You see how they use the word ‘coercion’? Not persuasion, but:

co·er·cion /ko???r??n/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[koh-ur-shuhn] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
–noub
1. the act of coercing; use of force or intimidation to obtain compliance.
2. force or the power to use force in gaining compliance, as by a government or police force.

This is what the NIR and ID cards is all about: the use of totalitarian government force to enslave the population.

“There are advantages to designation of documents associated with particular target groups, eg young people who may be applying for their first driving licence.”

The document adds that “universal compulsion should not be used unless absolutely necessary”.

Meaning that they need to have a pretext to bring it in? Like a ‘terrorist’ attack or some bogus emergency condition, or some crisis, like too many Eastern european people ‘clogging up the system’.

Once again, these problems can be solved without an NIR and ID cards. If you close the borders to all EU nationals, then the flow will be stemmed. But that is another question for another post.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “The Government has seen their ID card proposals stagger from shambles to shambles. Now they plan to use coercion in a desperate attempt to bolster a failed policy.”

And you are going to do what? We still have not heard a commitment to the abolition of the NIR and the repealing of all biometric passports from the Tories. Do correct me if I am wrong about that.

Shami Chakrabarti, of the human rights group Liberty, added: “So much for a voluntary scheme. This leaked memo confirms what we have already known – that compulsion is the ultimate ambition of this scheme.”

I am not in the fan club of Liberty I am afraid, but their website has an interesting piece of history:

Liberty was founded in 1934 as the National Council for Civil Liberties, principally to monitor the policing of protests.

NCCL (renamed Liberty in 1989) has campaigned to protect and promote rights and freedoms for over 70 years.

Our founder, Ronald Kidd, created the Council because he was concerned about the use of police agent provocateurs to incite violence during the hunger marches of 1932.

President of the first Council was E.M. Forster, with vice-presidents including Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, A.A. Milne, J.B. Priestley and Bertrand Russell.

With the UK’s complicity with torture and threats to privacy, free speech and protest rights in the news daily, over 70 years later, Liberty’s work is far from over.

As we have seen, using agent provocateurs is a long standing technique used by the police to create a pretext for clamping down on protest. That is another reason why demonstrating in the street is not only useless, it is dangerous. In the past, where it was impossible for people to communicate to millions of citizens unless you were working on a newspaper (and hence effectively neutered) demonstrations were necessary to literally rally support and act as a show of strength; to connect people to each other, to spread information rapidly and efficiently. Now of course, all of that can be done without going anywhere, at no cost. You also take away the enemy’s opportunity to spark off fake violence and induct the leaders into the police information systems, mischaracterize the legitimate concerns of fed up citizens and deflate movement.

A Home Office spokesman said: “When developing policy, it is right and logical that our first priority is to consider where ID cards can be of greatest benefit to the UK and to the individual.”

[…]

Telegraph

And there you have the mentality of these monsters perfectly encapsulated in a single sentence. Note that the person who said it is unnamed, so fterrified are they that their words will come back to haunt them.

These people are unaccountable, working in secret, without a care for the rights of the people for whom they work and to whom they are responsible.

This scheme is doomed to failure. The number of people who are now saying that they will not comply with it is growing every day. That they are still wasting time and money on it is a scandal.

By Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor
Last Updated: 2:04am GMT 26/01/2008

The security of the online computer system used by more than three hundred thousand people to view the private details of children is in doubt after HM Government admitted it was not secure enough to be used by MPs, celebrities and the Royal Family.

Thousands of “high profile” people have been secretly removed from the ContactPoint system amid concerns that their confidential details would be put at risk.

This provoked anger from consumer groups and accountants who said the same levels of security should be offered to all British children regardless of their perceived fame.

HMRC was responsible for losing 25 million child benefit records and the latest admission will concern millions of people entrusting the online system with their confidential financial records.

[…]

ContactPoint has a list of those excluded from the new rules who must have their records kept on hard copies for “security reasons”.

Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to use the electronic system to make the Jan 31 deadline this week.

ContactPoint records contain children’s names, addresses, parent details, doctor details and other sensitive personal information, – all valuable to paedophiles.

On Friday, senior doctors said they had concerns over the security of the system – apparently confirmed by the the Government’s secret policy.

Mike Warburton, of the General Medical Council, said: “Either ContactPoint is a system which can guarantee confidentiality for all or they should defer plans to roll it out. It is extraordinary that MPs and others can enjoy higher security.”

Mark Wallace, of the Dr. Barnardos charity, said: “This double standard is unacceptable. If the online system is not secure enough for MPs, why should ordinary taxpayers have to put up with it?”

The system was uncovered by the Tory MP Andrew Robathan, who received a letter saying his children’s records could not be found online. He challenged ministers.

“Given our discussions on the efficiency of HMRC recently, how come I have also been sent a letter from my doctor saying I cannot find my children online?”

Jane Kennedy, a Treasury minister, told him: “There are categories of individual for whom security is a higher priority. Not just MPs – there are several categories – and HMRC does not have the facilities for their children to be placed online.”

[…]

INTERRUPTION!

This statement means that Jane Kennedy believes that there is a way to create a higher security system for celebrities and MPs that depends only on facilities and not the nature of data or databases!!!!!!

[…]

In a statement to The Daily Telegraph, ContactPoint confirmed the policy. “ContactPoint services are designed with security as an integral part of the service. We use leading technologies and encryption software to safeguard data and operate strict security standards.

“A tiny minority of individuals’ records, including MPs, have extra security measures over and above the very high standards of confidentiality with which ContactPoint treats all childrens’ data.

“The separate arrangements mean their doctors are unable to use the online service.”

The extra security applies to those in the public eye. Their details are thought to be stored on a highly-restricted database with extra levels of security.

ContactPoint stressed that all childrens’ details were secure.

[…]

Telegraph

And there you have it.

This blog, which is on our blogroll, is a sober voice to pay attention to:

Identity cards might not become compulsory for all Britons, Gordon Brown has appeared to suggest [at his monthly press conference].

Anyone getting a passport from 2010 will have to get a card, and ministers had said they would be compulsory for all if Labour won the next election.

But, in an apparent softening of that line, Mr Brown described compulsion only as an “option” which is “open”.

The press conference:

Question:
Do you think that in the medium to long term, to be effective, ID cards will need to be compulsory for British citizens?
Prime Minister:
That is the option that we have left ourselves open to but we haven’t legislated for it. [yet!]

I think over the course of the next few months people will see that there is some wisdom in the argument that we have put forward for identity cards themselves. If you look at the information that we are asking people to give for their identity card it is not much more than is actually required for a passport, but the advantage people have from an identity card is that that information cannot be used without biometric identification. So that is why we are starting with the foreign nationals and that is why we will move further, linking if you like passport information to biometrics over the course of the next few years, but we leave open a parliamentary vote on the decision about compulsion.

Well, there are all sorts of lies/mistakes in that response, such as the information to be stored* (or see BBC), and not answering the question, but let’s consider the issue of compulsion because this seems to be the hot potato at the moment.

Take care not to get drawn into whether or not ID cards will themselves become compulsory, because I think that as well as a ’softening of the tone’ as Phil Booth of NO2ID put it (indeed, perhaps Gordon is softening us up), we are being enticed on a wild goose chase – they don’t want us to consider or argue about what we should be concerned about.

And this is the National Register, the privacy demolishing database behind the cards (based on something that doesn’t function 100% at present).

(Not only because of the argument below, and that it is overkill, infringes on civil liberties, and probably won’t work, but also because here opponents to ID cards can find some common ground with supporters of the principle of ID cards but not this particular proposal.)

Once you are enrolled on the National Register, you are the card, in a sense – in other words, on accessing a service, you could just use a fingerprint or PIN. The card is surplus to requirements, really, unless it’s useful in circumstances to be able to simply show one (the lowest level of security envisaged by the Government’s proposals).

That said, it seems to me at least that Labour’s plan has always been to make ID cards compulsory: the IPS website is unequivocal (”Yes, it will eventually be compulsory”); Home Secretaries are unequivocal (”When we announced the decision, in principle, in November 2003 to introduce ID cards, it was made clear then that there would be a two-stage scheme. It was stated that the second stage would be compulsory—that it would apply to every UK resident”); Home Office Ministers too (”It is the Government’s policy that ID cards should eventually be compulsory”).

In short, it has been a fairly consistent public position of Labour’s.
I say fairly consistent… well, try Googling for “id cards compulsory”, taken together the first two results are amusing: the first article says, “Compulsory ID cards ruled out”; the second, “Move towards compulsory ID cards”; the two stories being just four months apart.
But if you read a lot of articles about ID cards, you’ll see these changes over time, and I think you’ll come to the same conclusion as me: that the intention is to make sure we are all enrolled on the National Register.

And we will be enrolled when we renew or apply for ‘designated documents‘. A designated document might be a passport – it could also be a driving licence, any ‘document’ the Home Secretary designates (after being approved by Parliament).
The Explanatory Notes to the Act say,

If a document is designated, anyone applying for one will simultaneously need to apply to be entered in the Register, unless he is already so registered (see section 5(2)). He would also need to apply for an ID Card unless he already has one. There is, however, an exception to the requirement to apply for an ID Card where the designated document being applied for is a British passport and the application is made before 1^st January 2010 (see subsection 6(7)). …
Under subsection (7) an application for a designated document must include an application for an ID card in the manner prescribed unless the application is being made before 1^st January 2010, is for a British passport and the application contains a declaration that the individual does not wish to be issued with an ID Card. Individuals applying for British passport can therefore choose to ‘opt out’ of being issued with an ID Card but only up until 1^st January 2010. The ‘opt out’ does not apply to the Register. All individuals who apply for a passport will be required to be entered onto the Register once the passport becomes a designated document.

In short, once passports become ‘designated documents’, you can opt out of being issued with an ID card until 2010, but you will nevertheless be compelled to enrol on the National Register.

Update
Question Time (BBC):

Mr Cameron asked if it was still government policy that ID cards would be compulsory for all. He read out a quote from Chancellor Alistair Darling, who said: “I do not want my whole life to be reduced to a magnetic strip on a plastic card.”The Tory leader added: “Compared with being Chancellor in his government being a magnetic strip on a plastic card is probably a welcome relief.”

If it was the policy of the government to press for compulsion, why did the PM say in an interview with The Observer that they would not be compulsory for existing British citizens, Mr Cameron asked the prime minister.

Mr Brown said he had made those comments because there had to be a vote in Parliament before they became compulsory. He asked if Mr Cameron supported identity cards for foreign nationals, which are being introduced this year.

Mr Cameron said he was against compulsory ID cards and asked why Mr Brown could not give a straight answer to the question.

“It is the government’s policy to move ahead with this,” said Mr Brown, depending on a vote in Parliament and how the voluntary scheme works.

Gordon does want compulsory ID cards and National Register enrolment for British citizens. It is that simple.
He told the Observer that, “under our proposals there is no compulsion for existing British citizens”. As you can see, that is not the truth. (see also Guardian and Telegraph)

* note however that this has gone from being “no more” or “the same as” with passports, or simply and merely “core identity information”, to “not much more” than “actually” required for a passport, honest guv.

[…]

http://ukliberty.wordpress.com/

I would like a Word Press plugin that scanned our blogroll and perhaps a list of RSS feeds, put summaries into WPadmin so that BLOGDIAL authors can cherry pick from them to save us copying pasting clicking and indenting manually.

In fact, the ultimate tool to do this would be a bundle for Textmate, that imports a list of posts and summaries as a new document with a ‘fetch’ keyboard shortcut, thereafter allowing another keyboard shortcut to present you with a ‘context selector’ of all the recent posts (like when you hit command shift b to turn a document into a blog post) so that you can import the post and then work with it. No doubt there will be more clever ways to present these lists, but the fact remains that we spend alot of time manually cross posting for comment and analysis and its a PITA that could be eliminated.

Only 2 years late…

A piece on NIR and ID cards in light of the latest delay tactics of Grodon Broon.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,2245836,00.html

“I’m optimistic that even if it starts to roll out, at some point down the line this is all going to start to fall apart,” says Neil Gerrard, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, and a sharp critic of the
plans. “I think it’ll be disputed by the courts. If you reach a point where somebody is being told, ‘You cannot be issued with a passport because you have not put your name on the register’, you’re bound to get human rights challenges to that.“

The link at top to a Blogdial post in early ’06 addressed the problem thusly…

I refuse an ID card, I will be unable to get a passport.

If I cannot get a passport, I am for all intents and purposes interned in my own country.

My government cannot deny my travel and/or entry and exit to my own country.

Therefore it follows: passports must not be required for a British citizen to transit UK borders.

Could this last part be true?

After hounding HMG / HMRC for a while with no answer forthcoming we are left with two possibilities.

Either they don’t know the answer, or they don’t want anyone to know the answer.

In the same piece, Nick Clegg shows signs of being coloured LibDem Yella (sic);

When we meet in his Westminster office, I read the quote out to him. Does he stand by it? “Well,” he says, “the first thing I’ll do, of course, is argue against the legislation.”

OK. But if Labour win the next election and the watershed moment of universal compulsion arrives, what then? He pauses. “I’m going to effectively lead by example. I just cannot envisage the circumstances in which I would, by compulsion, give up my data.”

[…]

Here’s a crass but unavoidable question, then. Would you go to jail?

“Well, I mean … I’d be prepared to go to court. I guess it would start with fines. We don’t know what the sanctions are going to be, but I can’t take my position – that I’m not going to accept
compulsion even if it’s written into primary legislation – unless I’m prepared to face the sanctions.”

He agrees that all this represents a big step, happily acknowledging that some of his colleagues advised him against it. His young staff make a point of reminding me that imprisonment would mean that their boss would have to give up his parliamentary seat. But is he really
prepared to go to such lengths?

This powderpuff politician needs to (1) grow some cojones, (2) stop posturing and stand by his principles, if he really has any.

Anyway, the argument is moot. This parrot is dead.

They Know It.

A homeschooling father and mother from Germany have fled to Iran with their son in search of educational freedom and apparently are being sought by authorities for child kidnapping, according to WND sources.

Meanwhile, a new campaign has been launched by German lawmakers to approve a provision that would allow authorities to simply take legal custody of children whose parents are trying to avoid problems associated with the public school system.

The two situations are the latest developments as parental rights in Germany are under attack, especially regarding the right to direct the education of their own children, homeschool advocates say.

WND just weeks ago reported on an “open season,” on homeschoolers in Germany when a government letter to school officials revealed that when parents refuse to send their children to a state-approved school, it is now considered “a misuse of parental custody rights, which violates the well-being of the child.”

Now word has surfaced about a couple whose concern for their gifted son prompted their flight to Iran.

“As a family with a gifted and talented child, we fled Germany … with two suitcases and with the last of our money being spent on our flight to Iran,” a letter from the Mahjoubi Assil family to “supporting friends” said.

The family includes the father, the mother, and the son. It was written by the mother on behalf of the family*.

“As things stand now, Germany is unworthy of membership in the European Community, or to speak on Human Rights in the international arena. The shadows of the Third Reich and the ideology of Adolf Hitler – if not worse – still drift over Germany,” the letter said.

*The names of the family members have been removed at their request.

[…]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59823

All to be upstanding:

Sar Zad Az Ufuq Mihr-i Hawaran
Furug-i Dida-yi Haqq-bawaran
Bahman – Farr-i Iman-i Mast
Payamat Ay Imam Istiqlal. Azadi-naqs-i Gan-i Mast
Sahidan – Picida Dar Gus-i Zaman Faryad-i Tan
Payanda Mani Wa Gawidan
Gumhuri-yi Islami-i Iran

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjqv-USwHPY

Look at this video on YouTube.

I have been saying for years that all that is needed to kill the war machine is for people to stay home en masse, to stop feeding the machine, and that marching and demonstrating in the streets is useless. There is a reason why so many horror / disaster films feature empty streets as the ultimate nightmare:

The only way we can permanently stop war is to think obliquely use common sense and do not do anything that will not permanently fix what is wrong.

We had this debate on BLOGDIAL before the historic march organized by StopWar. Demonstrations are pointless because they do not achieve their ends, and the people who go on them are nothing more than stupid monkeys; the people who organize them are actually working for the enemy. Time and time again we have said this, (and other stuff) and had it proved, sadly.

Now the directors of this film, after everything we have said and witnessed are asking everyone to:

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=739

Now, it seems, the message has emerged into the infinitely dense inertia sump of the mass that the only way out is O.U.T.

This video is only the beginning. The next obvious step is for all those people to simply NOT PAY on the 15th.

This is all a consequence of the internets, some ideas whose time has come, and a shift in the mass that is unstoppable. The only choice that the enemy has is to be swept aside as the mass moves, like a glacier, crushing everything underneath it that is not part of it, carrying boulders along with it, carving out the landscape in its slow, majestic and inexorable way.

Global warming will not melt THIS glacier. No lie will penetrate it, or deflect it.

False flag terror has been de-fanged as a way to motivate the mass, thanks again to some great documentary films on the internets.

The ideas of liberty are now spreading geometrically to every corner of the mass on the globe. It is bigger than one man. This next action, and the actions to follow will have a profound, tangible, measurable effect that will be iterated again through the network that connects the mass, further empowering it in a feedback loop that will increase the density of the liberty idea within the mass, making it even more impenetrable, more able to absorb any lie, in the way that black holes absorb everything; but in the case of the mass, there is no event horizon. Ideas falling into the mass are actually absorbed and then destroyed.

This action is quite different to the feel good, useless, safety valve false maneuvers of demonstrations and marches, that feed back only despair, failure, exhaustion and an overwhelming feeling of impotence, smallness and hopelessness – just what the enemy and its witting and unwitting boosters have been using to corral the mass into acquiescence. Now, another type of feedback is building up, and its shrill shriek blots out the bleating of the ‘there is nothing we can do’ brigade of sheeple; it is a force field of feedback that uses the infinite gravity of the mass as its power source. All the old messages are dead. The old lies are crumbling under the tidal forces as the mass moves.

They are FINISHED!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/story/0,,2240907,00.html

ID cards for foreigners within three years

… which is the modern-day, socially acceptable (to HMG) equivalent of the compulsory wearing of a Star of David. And the first step on the path to Idi Aminism, as you mentioned yesterday.

On BBQ they run HMG-approved, “ID-lite: it’s alrite” stories.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7186643.stm

But still quote BlindKid, telling it like it is:

Former Home Secretary David Blunkett, who introduced the initial identity card bill, said the scheme would not work unless everyone had to have a card. “In my opinion, without it being mandatory, there is little point in doing it,” he added.

And…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,,2241005,00.html

FBI wants instant access to British identity data

… which is just incredible. For those worried by such schemes there are simple steps to avoid it, as Blogdial has repeatedly pointed out:
1. Don’t give anyone your personal data
2. Vote Tory/LibDem and let them know why you are prepared to support them.
3. DON’T GIVE ANYONE YOUR PERSONAL DATA.

Then, of course, there is the Prum Treaty, which gives anyone in the EU with access to the right computer, indirectly or directly, access to all your personal government-collected information. Do you know anyone who has heard of it, mentioned it to you, expressed their concern? I don’t.
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.12/prum-treaty-eu

It’s the secret tunnel through which personal liberty escapes, dug in the depths of night with a stolen spoon, and hidden from sight behind a poster of a busty wench… it goes unnoticed until one day…

‘That’s not Personal Freedom! That’s a papier-mache model of Personal Freedom!?!?!?! Hang on… OMIGOD Personal Freedom has has been whisked away down the secret tunnel behind the busty wench! How did we not notice!?’

‘I dunno… I’ve been sleeping in the same room as Personal Freedom for years and didn’t have an inkling anything like this could happen… ‘

How many times will people ignore the scraping sounds in the night before they wake up?

On a similar vein, after a year or two of ‘Facebook is fab, you simply must join and be my “friend”‘ articles, there is now a plethora of bleating, indignant tripe being written about how bad Facebook is, and how shocked these commentators are that Facebook has a very convoluted privacy policy, exploits your personal data to the absolute limits, and exists purely to make profit for people who are already incredibly wealthy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/10/privacy.it
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/20/facebook.privacy

‘Hang on, you seem to be fucking me up the arse and have been doing for some time but I’ve only just noticed!’

No pity for fools here. Just contempt for what passes as insightful journalism.

Gah!

Our unelected Prime Minister Gordon Brown still does not seem to have grasped the fundamentals of his NuLabour compulsory centralised biometric database the National Identity Register scheme according to this propaganda interview with The Observer newspaper this Sunday

Gordon Brown demonstrated how shockingly out of touch with the real world, by trying to justify the multi-billion pound compulsory national population surveillance and control infrastructure that is the National Identity Register, partly because of some small scale, unproven fingerprint biometric trials in some US and, allegedly, European shops, even though there have been no such successful trials in the UK, and no major UK retailer has decided that the idea is worth spending money on nationally.

The Yorkshire Ranter got in ahead of us, to point out some of the obvious flaws in Gordon Brown’s muddled answers to the rather soft and friendly questioning by The Observer regarding so called “ID Cards”.

Maybe when you go to a supermarket, as happens in some parts of the States and Europe, you are going to be safer, instead of carrying a credit card which can easily be stolen, to use your biometrics to shop.

This has to be some kind of record for biometric scienciness; the Government has historically always handwaved reality-based objections to ID cards away by claiming that we wouldn’t need them very often, whilst also floating insanely grandiose visions of biometric imperialism. Charles Clarke, we may recall, advertised them as “making it easier to rent videos”; as well as offering horrific new possibilities for total surveillance, this would have blasted the Government’s hazy costings down to nothing, demanding vast numbers of readers and numbers of transactions per second that even telecoms engineers would consider ambitious. To say nothing of insulting our intelligence.

This idea is both ridiculous, and, typically for Gordon Brown, a re-tread of a previously announced idea – see Gordon Brown – part 3 of the Chatham House speech on the 10th of October 2006, when he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer, trying unsuccessfully to pretend that he had a grasp on “security” and foreign affairs.

See also this NO2ID discussion forum thread on this latest spin by Gordon Brown.

See also Ideal Government, for another dissection of Gordon Brown’s ideas on “ID Cards” as outlined in the Observer interview.

We have not forgotten the other recent, dishonest and misleading attempts by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and by his “no longer a safe pair of hands” sidekick Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, who tried to pretend that the ongoing missing HMRC data .privacy and security breach scandal , which has not gone away, for which they are personally responsibler, would somehow have been less serious, if the the wretched biometric National Identity Register had been in place and linked to the missing Child Benefit Award database.

These political lies were punctured elegantly by this open letter from leading academic experts, who described them as a “fairy-land” scenario.

[…]

From Spyblog

Is any of this really a surprise?

Gordon Brown is a piece of shapeless grey clay in motion; imaginationless, artless, without personality or a soul; a creature, a tool, a lifeless monster. He has not a single idea of his own; his only reason for being is to attain a place where people will bow to him and where he can rub shoulders with ‘the great and the good’. This is why he hates Prime Ministers Questions he is not the PM to be grilled and made to look bad; he is there to shmooze with Richard Branson and make speeches on the New World Order world stage.

All that needs to be done is to completely refuse to comply with any aspect of the ID card scheme. The market is taking care of Mr Brown from their angle.

A bastard like Brown cannot survive a simultaneous attack from every side.

These people are so terrified of the public that they have to go out with security for even the smallest thing.

And while we are at it, look at the sort of FILTH these beasts eat:

Honestly, people who don’t know enough not to eat SHIT like that have no business telling ANYONE ANYTHING about ANYTHING.

We start the year in Britain with a challenge to our essential nature, for 2008 might turn out to be the year when we decide to rip up the Magna Carta.

Among the basic civil rights in this country, there has always been, at least in theory, an inclination towards liberal democracy, which includes a tolerance of an individual’s right to privacy.

We are born free and have the right to decide what freedom means, each for ourselves, and to have control over our outward existence, yet that will no longer be the case if we agree to identity cards.

Britain is already the most self-watching country in the world, with the largest network of security cameras; a new study suggests we are now every bit as poor at protecting privacy as Russia, China and America.

But surveillance cameras and lost data will prove minuscule problems next to ID cards, which will obliterate the fundamental right to walk around in society as an unknown.

Some of you may have taken that freedom so much for granted that you forget how basic and important it is, but in every country where ID cards have ever been introduced, they have changed the relation between the individual and the state in a way that has not proved beneficial to the individual. I am not just talking Nazi Germany, but everywhere.

It is also a spiritual matter: a person’s identity is for him or her to decide and to control, and if someone decides to invest the details of their person in a higher authority, then it should not be the Home Office.

The compulsory ID card scheme is a sickness born of too much suspicion and too little regard for the meaning of tolerance and privacy in modern life.

Hooking individuals up to a system of instantly accessible data is an obscenity – not only a system waiting to be abused, but a system already abusing.

Though we don’t pay much attention to moral philosophy in the mass media now – Bertrand Russell having long been exchanged for the Jeremy Kyle Show – it may be worth remembering that Britain has a tradition of excellence when it comes to distinguishing and upholding basic rights and laws in the face of excessive power.

The ID cards issue should be raising the most stimulating arguments about who we are and how we are – but no, it is not: we nose the grass like sheep and prepare to be herded once again.

It seems the only person speaking up with a broad sense of what this all means is Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, who has devoted much of his new year message to underlining the sheer horribleness of the scheme.

He has said he will go to jail rather than bow to this “expensive, invasive and unnecessary” affront to “our natural liberal tendencies”.

I have to say I cheered when I heard this, not only because I agree, but because it is entirely salutary, in these sheepish times, to see a British politician express his personal feelings so strongly.

Many people on the other side of the argument make what might be called a category mistake when they say: “If you’ve nothing to hide, why object to carrying a card?”

Making it compulsory to prove oneself, in advance, not to be a threat to society is an insult to one’s right not to be pre-judged or vetted.

Our system of justice is based on evidence, not on prior selection, and the onus on proving criminality is a matter for the justice system, where proof is of the essence.

Many regrettable things occur as a result of freedom – some teenage girls get pregnant, some businessmen steal from their shareholders, some soldiers torture their enemies, some priests exploit children – but these cases would not, in a liberal society, require us to end the private existence of all people just in case.

If the existence of terrorists, these few desperate extremists, makes it necessary for everybody in Britain to carry an ID card then it is a price too high.

It is more than a price, it is a defeat, and one that we will repent at our leisure. Challenges to security should, in fact, make us more protective of our basic freedoms; it should, indeed, make us warm to our rights.

In another age, it was thought sensible to try to understand the hatred in the eyes of our enemies, but now it seems we consider it wiser just to devalue the nature of our citizenship.

What’s more – it won’t work. Nick Clegg has pointed to the gigantic cost and fantastic hubris involved in this scheme, but recent gaffes with personal information have shown just how difficult it is to control and protect data.

A poll of doctors undertaken by doctors.net.uk has today shown that a majority of doctors believe that the National Programme for IT – seeking to contain all the country’s medical records – will not be secure.

In fact, it is causing great worry. Many medical professionals fear that detailed information about each of us will soon be whizzing haphazardly from one place to another, leaving patients at the mercy of the negligent, the nosy, the opportunistic and the exploitative.

“Only people with something to hide will fear the introduction of compulsory ID cards.”

That is what they say, and it sounds perfectly practical. If you think about it for a minute, though, it begins to sound less than practical and more like an affront to the reasonable (and traditional) notion that the state should mind its own business.

In a just society, what you have to hide is your business, until such times as your actions make it the business of others. Infringing people’s rights is not an ethical form of defence against imaginary insult.

You shouldn’t have to tell the government your eye colour if you don’t want to, never mind your maiden name, your height, your personal persuasions in this or that direction, all to be printed up on a laminated card under some compulsory picture, to say you’re one of us.

You weren’t born to be one of us, that is something you choose, and to take the choice out of it is wrong. It marks the end of privacy, the end of civic volition, the end of true citizenship.

[…]

Telegraph

Well, the hammer has finally struck.

Several months ago, I wrote a column in which I described the strategy the establishment would use to attack Ron Paul’s candidacy:

The first step is already in play. The establishment will start by simply ignoring him, by using its power in the mainstream media and their influence over campaign donors. If possible, they will find ways of excluding him from the debates.

This strategy is already failing. The internet and talk radio are outside the elite’s direct control and are being used effectively by Rep. Paul to “get the message out.” (And mark my words, sooner or later the oligarchy will come for the internet. This medium has been a royal pain in their derriere from day one.)

If this strategy fizzles, the establishment will move on to ridicule and fear mongering. Ron’s ideas will be grotesquely distorted in establishment media “hit pieces.” They’ll say he wants to permit heroin use in public schools, or that he wants old people to die in the streets without their social security checks, or that he wants to allow greedy industrialists to dump toxic waste into our drinking water.

The next arrow in the oligarchy’s quiver will be scandal – real or fabricated. Usually, this takes the form of pictures, billing records, etc. involving financial or sexual hi-jinks. For folks with the right motivation and abilities, it would be child’s play to implicate him in some sort of phony ethical, moral, or financial skullduggery (e.g., doctored pictures, sordid media accounts from “eyewitnesses,” etc.)

Since the first two tactics met with limited success, they predictably moved on to the third (scandal) in the form of a scurrilous article in The New Republic. In that screed, James Kirchick accused Rep. Paul of authoring a series of articles that insulted blacks, gays, and a myriad of other “groups.”

Ron responded quickly. In a Reason interview, he noted that he did not write the articles in question and did not edit them. To his credit, he did take moral responsibility for inadequately policing the content of a newsletter associated with his name.

What is particularly nauseating about this hit-piece is the host of glaring double standards it represents.

James Kirchick is a prototypical neocon and a supporter of Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy for president. Rudy has been, from the start, a staunch supporter of Bush’s “War on Terror,” including the invasion of Iraq.

That invasion was conceived long before 9/11 and has taken the lives of somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million Iraqi civilians. Nearly four thousand American soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands more are physically and/or emotionally crippled. Our nation’s reputation has been soiled, perhaps irrevocably.

As has been exhaustively documented, that war was launched in a fog of lies, propaganda, and fabricated intelligence.

So now, five years into the war, we are forced to endure an attack by these same neocons, who are accusing the one viable antiwar candidate of…what?

Even if Ron Paul wrote every word in every one of those articles, how does that compare to the death and destruction the neocons have rained down on Iraq? It takes unimaginable chutzpah, nearly pathological gall, to stand amid mounds of smoking corpses and accuse Rep. Paul of cultural insensitivity.

Has America become so politically egocentric, so utterly consumed with its own cultural fetishes, that we could tolerate watching those who perpetrated the Iraq atrocity (or who supported it) smear a decent man for inadequately supervising a newsletter?

If Ron Paul’s candidacy is now tainted for (allegedly) slandering people of color, what should be the political punishment for Giuliani, McCain, Romney, and others who supported mass death and dismemberment of a third world country?

Even though I anticipated this sort of thing, it is infuriating to watch it unfold before my eyes.

Are we to be spared nothing?

In a very fundamental way, there are really only two candidates running for president this year: Ron Paul, and all the others.

This is because there are really only two issues at stake.

The first issue is our out-of-control foreign policy. America is embroiled in shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We spend more on our military than nearly the rest of the world combined. We have troops stationed in over a hundred foreign countries. Manic interventionism has stretched our military to the breaking point, and has ruined our nation’s reputation.

The second issue is our impending economic implosion. Our government, which has shed the last vestiges of constitutional restraint, has made a myriad of promises that it cannot keep. Our outstanding obligations to fund social security, government health care programs, and everything else under the sun are rapidly bankrupting our nation. To maintain these Ponzi schemes, the Fed is debasing our currency and igniting an ugly bout of hyperinflation.

Our predicament is severe and profound. We must immediately begin to shed our overseas obligations and put our domestic house in order. Otherwise, we will find ourselves reenacting the collapse of the Soviet Union right here at home.

Ron Paul is the only candidate who is willing to address these issues. He is the only one who is willing to speak frankly with the American people about our predicament and the painful actions which must be taken to prevent a real catastrophe.

And rather than offering solutions, Obama, McCain, Clinton and Romney, (and the other political hacks running for president) are not even willing to talk honestly about the problems.

As I noted in the previous article, the reason for this is simple: The establishment benefits from the status quo and would be disempowered by Ron Paul’s proposed solutions.

Specifically, as I noted in that previous article, Ron Paul is running on three ideas:

1. The federal government must function within the strict guidelines of the Constitution.

2. America should deconstruct its empire, withdraw our troops from around the world and reestablish a foreign policy based on noninterventionism.

3. America should abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, eliminate fiat currency and return to hard money.

This is not a political agenda. This is not a party platform. It is a revolution. The entire ruling oligarchy would be swept away if these ideas were ever implemented. Every sentence, every word, every jot and tittle of this agenda is unacceptable, repellent and hateful to America’s ruling elite.

So let us all be forewarned. If Ron Paul’s candidacy should rise to serious contention, that New Republic hit piece will be mild compared to whatever comes next.

The rulers of the universe will not go quietly.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/latulippe/latulippe82.html

They might not go quietly, but they will go in the end, like the Roman Empire did, and hopefully in the manner that the Soviet Union ended…only much faster. After all, who has seventy years to wait before a totalitarian system collapses? The same will go for the European Union as the Soviet Union; people will spontaneously, Baudrillard Mass style, down tools and bring about the end through inertia; the inertia of The Mass.

Americans: They’re fucked up, they talk like fags and their shit’s retarded, to quote a prescient film.

On the other hand…

They are the only country that could produce a Ron Paul, and they are the only country where such a man had a actual chance to get elected to the highest office and turn the country around on a dime. That is what is literally needed in this case.

This is why everyone still has hope for America, that everyone still has hope that the greatest country of all cam somehow re-emerge from the utter darkness that has enveloped it.

Despair is useless, and in a situation where a candidate like Ron Paul exists and can win, it is insanely dangerous.

This year computer users will be more exposed to cybercriminals than ever before. It’s not just because online crime is so attractive to identity theft gangs but, ironically, because the computer security industry that is supposed to protect users has deteriorated – from one which shared everything about newly discovered weaknesses to what some within it now call a “protection racket”.

It may sound alarmist,

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/17/computersecurity

SNIP!

Yes, it IS alarmist, and yet another example of computer illiteracy at The Guardian.

The fact of the matter is that you can…anyone can… download and install Ubuntu and be free of this ‘problem’.

The fact of the matter is that writers like Sean Hargrave are a part of this ‘protection racket’ because they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge and spread the information that there are perfect alternatives to Winblows; i.e. Ubuntu, which Dell are now delivering on their machines pre-installed. By stopping people from dumping Windows, Hargrave is protecting the Windows monopoly and monoculture which is the source of all these problems, and many others.

There is no longer any excuse not to run Linux instead of Windows. It outperforms Windows in every way, and has everything you need that you find on Windows (office suite) but for FREE. Its user interface is now more sophisticated than Aero on Vista, and since you can buy it pre-installed, that problem is gone also.

The reason why The Guardian doesn’t like linux is because they are an old economy newspaper. They are against the free music, free publishing, and free software movements, and every time they have an article about anything to do with any of the aforementioned subjects, they always take the stand of ‘the man’.

The answer to this is not fear-mongering articles with pictures of devils menacing the lone Guardian believer in his C0₂ neutral hovel. The answer is ‘go open source’; then the secrecy that unscrupulous companies use to gain commercial advantage is erased and everyone benefits…unless you are in the pockets of the people who sell the crappy products that you are complaining about.

And then there is the ‘problem’ of having nothing to fearmonger about once Windows is dead. But then people like this always find something to try and scare everyone about.

I think we need a new category: ‘fear-mongering’.

It used to be that opposition to vaccines — especially vaccinating water supplies — was considered akin to walking around wearing a tin-foil hat. But concerns about vaccines have gained increasing validity in recent years. And never more so than with the publication this month of an article in Scientific American. The article, titled Second Thoughts on Vaccines, looks at the vaccines controversy, and the fact that the attitudes about vaccination among scientists are starting to shift. Mainstream scientists and experts are becoming increasingly vocal about the risks of too many vaccines.

Scientific American’s editors write: “Some recent studies suggest that over-consumption of vaccines can raise the risks of disorders affecting teeth, bones, the brain (autism) and the thyroid gland.”

The article’s author, Dan Fagin, is an award-wining environmental reporter and Director of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. He writes: “There is no universally accepted optimal level for vaccines.” And according to Fagin, some of the researchers he talked to even wonder whether the ones that are currently given as routine with no apparent ill effects is too much.

The article discusses the 3-year research process of a committee at the National Research Council (NRC), which, according to Fagin: “concluded that vaccines can subtly alter endocrine function, especially in the thyroid — the gland that produces hormones regulating growth and metabolism.” In addition to the thyroid concerns, Fagin discusses expert findings regarding lowered IQ levels, autism, and other health problems linked to vaccines overexposure. The NRC report, issued in 2006, recommended that the government reduce the current numbers of available vaccines, due to the health risks to both children and adults.

You can read the beginning of the article (the full Scientific American article is available for online purchase and download), online here.

[…]

About

“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

The next UK Census will be in 2011. Help us stop it being run by an arms company with close links to the United States government.

What’s the problem?

The process of running the 2011 Census will be contracted out by the Office of National Statistics to a private company.

One of the two contractors in the final round of selection is the arms company Lockheed Martin, 80% of whose business is with the US Department of Defense and other Federal Government agencies.

This might concern you because:

• The Census rules mean that every household will be legally obliged to provide a wide range of personal information that will be handled by the chosen contractor.
• Lockheed Martin produces missiles and land mines which are being used in Afghanistan and Iraq and which are illegal in many countries.
• They also focus on intelligence and surveillance work and boast of their ability to provide ‘integrated threat information’ that combines information from many different sources.
• New questions in the 2011 Census will include information about income and place of birth, as well as existing questions about languages spoken in the household and many other personal details.
• This information would be very useful to Lockheed Martin’s intelligence work, and fears that the data might not be safe could lead to many people not filling in their Census forms.

Census Alert is therefore campaigning to stop Lockheed Martin from being given the contract.

The campaign is supported by the Green Party, politicians from Plaid Cymru, Labour and the Scottish National Party, and others opposed to the arms trade and concerned about personal privacy.

We are not opposed to the Census itself. Aggregated, the information collected is important in allocating resources to local authorities and public services.

But personal privacy is important too, and we are concerned that Lockheed Martin’s involvement could undermine public confidence in the process and lead to inaccurate data being collected.

What can I do?
There is still time to stop this happening and we are not calling for a boycott of the Census at this stage.
Before the final decisions on the contract are made, we are asking you to do the following:

Sign our petition opposing arms company involvement in the Census at:
Contact your MP and ask them to raise the issue in Parliament.
Contact your local Councillor and ask them to highlight their concerns about the allocation of local authority resources.

More about taking action on this issue

The 2006 Canadian Census campaign
Lockheed Martin were also involved in the 2006 Census in Canada, and a campaign calling for a boycott was organised by Vive le Canada and supported by progressive MPs in Canada’s parliament.

The campaign did not succeed in getting them removed. But it did achieve its aim of ensuring only civil servants handled the actual data, and a new government task force was set up to monitor privacy during the Census.

[…]

http://censusalert.org.uk/

and so on…

Of course, we on BLOGDIAL do not think you should fill out a census form at all, for many reasons.

I know nothing about the politics of this organization, but their “I am not afraid” campaign is something I can certainly get behind. I think we should all send a letter like this to our elected officials, whatever country we’re in:

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.

Refuse to be terrorized, and you deny the terrorists their most potent weapon — your fear.

‘Terrorists’ do not want you to live in fear; they want you to get out of their countries and leave them alone. If you refuse to do that, then they will make you suffer the images and horror stories that they have suffered (only literally a million times worse).

Politicians are stoking up the fear of terror for their own ends. This has nothing to do with the true nature of these attacks, who is behind them and why we must view them in the correct context and solve the root problem; foreign policy.

EDITED TO ADD (12/21): There’s also this video.

And Chicago opens a new front on the war on the unexpected, trying to scare everybody:

Each year, the Winter Holiday Season tends to spur larger crowds and increased traffic throughout the City. As it pertains to shopping districts, public transportation routes, and all other places of public assembly, the increased crowds become a matter of Homeland Security concern. During this holiday period, as a matter of public safety, we ask that all members of the general public heighten their awareness regarding any and all suspicious activity that may be an indicator of a threat to public safety. It is important to immediately report any or all of the below suspect activities.

• Physical Surveillance (note taking, binocular use, cameras, video, maps)
• Attempts to gain sensitive information regarding key facilities
• Attempts to penetrate or test physical security / response procedures
• Attempts to improperly acquire explosives, weapons, ammunition, dangerous chemicals, etc.
• Suspicious or improper attempts to acquire official vehicles, uniforms, badges or access devices
• Presence of individuals who do not appear to belong in workplaces, business establishments, or near key facilities
• Mapping out routes, playing out scenarios, monitoring key facilities, timing traffic lights
• Stockpiling suspicious materials or abandoning potential containers for explosives (e.g., vehicles, suitcases, etc)
• Suspicious reporting of lost or stolen identification

This may be real or it may be a hoax; I don’t know.

And this is probably my last post on the war on the unexpected. There are simply too many examples.

[…]

http://www.schneier.com/blog

The answer to all of this is Ron Paul. His policies and thinking are in line with Mr. Schneier’s in that we have to look at the real problem, not episodes of ’24’ to find the solution to this activity.

I am doubtful wether begging for your rights to be restored is a good thing. These people do not listen to the electorate on any issue; it would be better for them to propose taking our liberty back, either through an election or otherwise.

Mass murderers are not the listening kind.

by Lew Rockwell
It was always Murray Rothbard’s argument that while we might from time to time be short-term pessimists, we should always be long term optimists, for many reasons from economics and history.

And look at what Ron Paul has done. Building on an unmatched record in public life, and decades of serious study of Austrian economics, foreign policy, American history, and constitutional law and philosophy, he has led a movement that is rightly called a revolution.

That revolution has touched the hearts of young people–and not only young people–across the country and the world. The ideals of peace, free trade, non-intervention, the gold standard, free markets, private property, and civil liberties have never been spread so well and so widely.

The fact that up to 10% of the Republican Party base, people who have historically supported war, empire, managed trade, central banking, business regulation, and the police state–“red-state fascists,” as I have called them–is really something quite extraordinary. Among independents and some Democrats, we will do much better.

Libertarians have long exulted in Ed Clark’s almost-one percent. Ron has improved on Ed by 900%. The political fight is far from done, of course. Ron will campaign hard in Michigan, Nevada, South Carolinia, and all the Super Tuesday states. He will not give up. He will never give up.

From the standpoint of the right and good, Ron Paul and our ideas should have an easy victory. But when has that ever been true, in all of human history?

Ron and his revolutionaries face not only bad ideas from neoconservatism to socialism, but a vast apparatus of entrenched rip-off artists from the Fed and its big banks and investment houses, to the military-industrial complex. There is, we could say, much work to do, and Ron Paul will do it.

Through the primaries, the convention, and beyond, Ron and his movement will stand for liberty against its enemies. He will get more and more votes, and more and more supporters, to add to the hundreds of thousands already onboard. His presence on the national scene will only grow, and so will libertarian ideals. Murray loved Ron Paul, thought the world of him as a candidate in 1988 and as an intellectual, and so do all real libertarians and pro-liberty conservatives.

And now, by the way, on to Michigan, where people are really feeling the pain of the Fed’s deepening recession, and will be especially ready to hear Ron’s message of sound noney and no business cycles under freedom.

“Wilkes and Liberty” was the cry of English and American classical liberals in the 18th century, naming a parliamentary champion of free speech, free press, and civil liberties against government tyranny. From now on, the cry of every libertarian will be, “Ron Paul and Liberty”! We have much work to do.Roll up your sleeves and join our champion!

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018458.html

There are the problems of the vast apparatus of entrenched rip-off artists from the Fed and its big banks and investment houses, to the military-industrial complex, but there is also the problem of the army of sheeple, of Eloi, of nincompoops, of people who are physically incapable of thinking (low IQ), the hard headed, the habituated, the delusional. These people, all of them, HAVE THE VOTE.

People in the 18th century had common sense. Men who did not own property could not vote. What we have today is a population that is too stupid to vote. That anyone, anywhere in the world, other than his relatives, could vote for John McCain is (yet another) testament to the utter stupidity of the american public.

Am I advocating the disenfranchisement of vast swathes of the american public? Hmmm! What is the inevitable outcome of the current crop of imbeciles having the vote and unthinkingly electing anyone other than Ron Paul? It means the disenfranchisement of ALL americans forever, as america is dismantled and its broken carcass subsumed into a North American Union and then a world government like human flesh absorbed into The Blob. Wouldn’t it be better if we took away the vote from these cretins BEFORE america is lost forever? In the final analysis the phrase, ‘live free or die’ if taken literally means that a free man could not and can not tolerate what the mass of dunderheads are unleashing upon him and his family.

And there you have the thinking behind the people who are determined to absolutely control everyone everywhere. They came to this conclusion decades ago, and are making sure that no one can ever cast a vote that will take away their liberty, which in this case, is predicated upon their absolute control over the population. Either that, or its all happening at random and I’m not sure if that is a worse proposition to contemplate.

Back to John McCain…

This is a man who says that it “would be fine with me” if the americans stay in Iraq for 100 years. Out loud. In public. Quite apart from all of his other insane policies, this one phrase alone should scare the flesh off of any american. What he is advocating is literally, the complete extinction of America. This is the same public that now knows that the pretext for invading Iraq was a lie. This is the same public that now believes that ‘911 was an inside job‘. Wether or not you believe that 911 was an inside job or not, if the majority of people believe that it is true, how is it possible that anyone other than Ron Paul is getting the majority of votes in these primaries? How can he possibly be equal in numbers to Judy Ruliani, arch warmonger / fearmonger whose whole campaign centers around the very 911 that they all believe is at the very least, fishy?

It boggles the imagination.

A very clever man said just before he died:

[…]

We have had the two worst Prime Ministers in our history – Edward Heath (who dragooned us into the Common Market) and Tony Blair. The harm these two have done to Britain is incalculable and almost certainly irreparable.

Whether the public can be blamed for letting them pursue their ruinous policies is debatable.

Short of assassination there is little people can do when their political masters have forgotten the true meaning of the democracy of which they are forever prating, are determined to have their own way at all costs and hold public opinion in contempt.

[…]

Daily Mail

When The Daily Mail prints an article saying that the only solution left is assassination, you know that there has been a sea change.

Live free or die. That phrase doesn’t mean ‘live free or commit suicide’. It means that you are willing to do anything unto death in order to be free. Disenfranchising the population, assassination, secession, suddenly people are actually talking about these options; not through desire for carnage and chaos and upheaval, but because every decent person has been backed into a corner and there is no way out.

A decent man with sons would not let the bovine majority cast a vote condemning his boys to be drafted into an insane man’s insane war. He has a few choices, and we all know that these choices have all been exercised in the recent past:

• Assassination,
• Disenfranchisement,
• Secession,
• Mass murder,
• Escape,
• Run for office and change the world (work in progress!),

Have I left anything out?

Oh yes:

• Join the winning side in the new feudal system!

Think about it; you keep everything you own, you get to own whatever else you like, you become one of the bosses, and there are no repercussions because the long pigs are too stupid to understand what is going on right in front of their faces.

Now, less of the horrorshow.

There have been great movements on this planet that have achieved monumental change without catastrophic bloodletting. I have said it before over and over, the only thing that you need to do to defeat the warmongers is NOTHING. No marching, no confrontation, simply remove yourself, (O.U.T.), no more participation, no more contribution, no more cooperation, no more passive obedience, no more of anything or action that helps the system work, unless the country is completely restored, all unconstitutional laws struck down and America returns. This ‘Do Not’ idea, when propagated widely is so profoundly disruptive, so powerful and unstoppable, it can topple any infrastructure. Since it is an idea, you cannot kill it. No on is marching in the streets to be arrested. No one is pitting themselves against armored personnel of the war machine. There is nothing to attack, no one to peruse, no head to cut off and nothing to capture..except the minds of your neighbors.

I do not believe that violence is right or necessary. You can get everything you want without so much as a fist fight. Assassination, disenfranchisement and other forms of violence are what our enemies use; they are the solutions of the imagiiantionless, the weak minded, mean spirited…the bad guys.

Thanks to the way democracy works, there is going to be a permanent unrepresented majority who are fed up to the teeth. It is this huge population of people, numbering in the high tens of millions, who are the constituency of the free, the people who can tip the balance and force change. They are the artists, the writers, business men, scientists, the better educated, the smart; they are the ones who make everything run, and they are the ones who can bring it all to a halt should they choose to do so.

All without firing a shot, clenching a fist or appearing in public.

The dream scenario is that the system works and America changes course and the world is put off of high alert. But I have always said that, “dreams are for those who sleep” either way the power to end this is in our hands, at the ends of our fingertips.

So let’s end it.

Every person living in a sovereign state on the continent of Africa wants Ron Paul to be the next president of the USA.

Why?

Because he is going to dismantle the evil american empire. That means that plans for the Imperial outpost and control nexus AFRICOM will be scrapped, and they will be spared what many countries have suffered for decades; an invading army of bored soldiers pestering the local women, the CIA operating freely to topple governments and directly manipulate elections and business, etc etc. Had AFRICOM gone ahead as planned, it would have been….’a bad thing’.

The Way Ahead
AFRICOM is still in its early planning stages. The command began initial operations in October 2007 and is still formulating mission, staffing and location options.

[…]

AFRICOM

No, ‘jar heads’, that is not ‘the way ahead’, it is another step down the road to DISASTER and the end of America.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

All people all over the world want the old America back; the America everyone looked up to and cherished. This is probably our last chance to bring it back in our lifetime, and the enemy is trying its best to stop it from happening. They are getting desperate and brazen, like the people who control FOX News and their excluding of Dr. Paul.

Which brings us to…

The american mainstream media is digging deep to try and derail and smear Ron Paul; this time around the hideous grimacing jelly joweled troll they have put in the center of the tracks in front of the oncoming train with a ‘STOP’ sign is named ‘Jamie Kirchick’.

He has instantly been discredited thanks to the internets.

Ron Paul is not a racist. And just for the record, I would rather have an honest, strict constitutionalist racist in the white house than any of the people who are currently running for president.

Thankfully, that hypothetical scenario does not apply in any way to Dr.Paul:

January 8, 2008 5:28 am EST

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – In response to an article published by The New Republic, Ron Paul issued the following statement:

“The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

“In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.’

“This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It’s once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

“When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publically taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.”

[…]

http://www.ronpaul2008.com/

It is interesting however, that the only things they can dig up about him are the things that he says, or is alleged to have said, and they can never attack his policies.

What this tells us is that his policies are 110% sound and unassailable.

Many years ago, May 1995 to be accurate, we dedicated a large section of issue 4 of our superb magazine Rivendell (named after a BBS, not LOTR btw!) to ‘Constitutions of the World’ – here are the parts:

Part2 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

Part3 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

Part4 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

Part5 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

Part6 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

You can see from the content of that issue why people like us want Ron Paul to become president; he stands for everything that we believe in and that we have believed in for a very long time.

Clarkson stung after bank prank

TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lost money after publishing his bank details in his newspaper column.

The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of 25 million people’s personal details on two computer discs.

He wanted to prove the story was a fuss about nothing.

But Clarkson admitted he was “wrong” after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.

Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told people how to find out his address.

“All you’ll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I’ve never known such a palaver about nothing,” he told readers.

But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times column.

“I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account,” he said.

“The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.

“I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake.”

Police were called in to search for the two discs, which contained the entire database of child benefit claimants and apparently got lost in the post in October 2007.

They were posted from HM Revenue and Customs offices in Tyne and Wear, but never turned up at their destination – the National Audit Office.

The loss, which led to an apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, created fears of identity fraud.

Clarkson now says of the case: “Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7174760.stm

Like I said before Jeremy Clarkson is a total idiot.

What amazes me about people like Clarkson is that he thinks people should take his advice both before AND after his authoritative articles. He is the same breed of moronic ‘journalist’ that will not believe in anything unless he sees it himself. He is the same breed of person who supports war until he gets into the trenches himself, whereupon he becomes an ardent pacifist. He is the sort that is an atheist until he has his own religious experience, thereafter becoming a total fanatic. Now he is calling for the people who lost the discs to be tortured. Bravo Mr. ‘Face of Agromegly’; lets see how you react to the actual act of ‘sticking cocktail sticks in their eyes’. I wager that a total coward like Clarkson could not even watch a video of real torture, much less carry it out himself.

This is a man without a clue, without principles, without common sense. And this is the best that The Times can dredge up to publish on a regular basis. No wonder blogs and bloggers are so popular; for once, everyone with more common sense than Jeremy Clarkson (which means 90% of people in Britain) can publish clear headed thinking to millions of people for the price of some electrons.

The good thing about this is that the people who need an extra little push to understand why this, the NIR and ID cards are such a disaster will learn from Clarksons imbecile antics. And the lulz.